traditions, and the offerings of the poetry of Edith Sitwell and T. S. Eliot.
Summing up these sources for the movement in view of Ascad Razznq’s book
on myth in contemporary Arabic poetry (1959), Nazeer El-Azma concludes,
“This development is a phenomenon of the modern aspiration of the Arabs and
their deep longing to be alive and productive in the family of mankind.”^110
In other words, further readings come at times as illuminating sparks that
direct attention to the dynamics of literary heritage, and to the pioneering trans-
gressions of AbnTammmm, his deviations from classical tenets, which Adnnls
incorporated in his challenge of the modern. Citing al-Marznql’s (d. 1030)
enumeration of these classical tenets of the qaxldah, in the introduction to Abn
Tammmm’s Dlwmn al->ammsah(The Book of the Poetry of Zeal/Fortitude),
Adnnls in the Rome Conference Proceedings questioned classical critical
commitments to the pre-Islamic model as one of irrevocable perfectibility and
absolute value (Proceedings, 171, 173). Applied to ethics and life, this model,
contended Adnnls, is a yardstick whose measurements are meant to stifle
innovation. The propagation of an ideal of fixity and immutability amounts to
taking the past as the epitome of the sacred, untouchable, and infallible, for that
matter (Ibid. 175). Such an argument works through paradigmatic comparison
and contrast, for innovators stand for life and change. As for “the ancient
and the traditional,” it “makes a gravity center in Arabic culture which
understands the human as no more than heir and enhancer” (Ibid. 176).
Modernity as a constant
Adnnls’ literary mind engaged him in generalizations that overlooked
discourse analysis and empowered cultural structures despite his subsequent
interest in dynamics of change in Al-Thmbit wa- al-muta.awwil: Ba.th fl
al-ittibmcwa- al-ibdmccinda al-cArab.^111 But Adnnls’ introductory critique in
the Rome Conference Proceedingscould be taken as a pioneering critical
insight that regards modernity as an ongoing process whose pioneers in the
classical period were many (Ibid. 177), beginning with Muslim Ibn al-Walld
(d. 823) and later AbnTammmm (d. 846). Language in this poetics is a living
thing that responds to experience, tension, and passion. Culture itself should
be liberated from edification toward freedom and expansion. Poetry is not
craft and expression, but creation and vision, he argued, to vindicate his poet-
ics of transgression (Ibid. 181). Certainly, the Adnnls of Rome had already
noticed his precursor’s achievement, especially in his deep awareness of the
inward underpinnings of language. Although not articulated, one may
assume that the Adnnls of Rome was aware of the precursor’s engagement
with the “the deep ritual structure—the Ancient Near Eastern paradigms of
sacrifice,” as studied by Suzanne P. Stetkevych.^112 The precursor’s studied
recourse to the mythical, as well as his transgression against the established
qaxldahformula were, perhaps, in the descendant’s mind, as testified to
by Adnnls’ emulation of the Dlwmn al->ammsahin his own Dlwmn al-Shicr
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS